Oak Island mystery: Its history is the real treasure

New book traces history of the South Shore site of treasure hunts, mysteries

Sydney author Joy Steele has her own theory on the centuries-old Oak Island mystery that has captured attention from treasure seekers around the globe. For the treasure-obsessed, the third season of Curse of Oak Island began Sunday on History. (ERIN POTTIE)

Joy Steele says forgotten history, not vast riches, is the greatest treasure to be found on Oak Island.

In her new book, The Oak Island Mystery Solved, the Sydney author delivers a convincing argument for strange discoveries and happenings that have drawn explorers to the South Shore for over two centuries.

Steele guides readers through a timeline of Oak Island’s earliest known events, including the alleged 1795 revelation that marked the discovery of a saucer-shaped depression on the Mahone Bay island’s east drumlin.

Three friends dug down into the crater, unearthing hidden layers of stone and timber they believed marked the location of a pirate’s treasure.

Since that time, no fewer than 17 expeditions have been mounted, millions spent and six lives lost in a fruitless search for unknown riches.

Oak Island’s intrigue even drew attention from the likes of actors John Wayne and Errol Flynn to curious politicians Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Part of the fascination with Oak Island has been fuelled by extraordinary findings that include an inscribed stone, the outline of a Christian cross, coconut fibres and tree markings. On several occasions, the island’s burrowed tunnels would flood, leaving some to believe its treasure was booby trapped.

“At that time, rumours were running rampant that Captain (William) Kidd may have buried treasure on Nova Scotia’s shores,” said Steele in a recent interview.

“Every venture that came along, something would happen. Other dimensions kept getting added and added, and the story just grew along the way.”

Steele said treasure hunting often centred on the initial discovery, which later became known as the money pit.

A founding member of the Friends of Oak Island Society, Steele herself once thought the clues pointed toward vast riches. But it wasn’t until she fell gravely ill that a logical theory came to mind. As her health began to improve, Steele vowed to solve the case of the Oak Island whodunit.

“I started breaking the myths down one by one,” she said.

“I went back to the earliest reports and, for example, they say the logs went all the way down every 10 feet, and that’s simply not true.”

Throughout her book, Steele untangles a web of clues that she said points to Oak Island having served as a tar-making location as part of the British naval stores industry.

“One thing led to another, and sometimes it came to a stop, but you kept going and going until you found documents. All the pieces just coalesced and came together like a jigsaw puzzle. It leaves no alternative in the logical mind, as far as I’m concerned.”

Steele said that while conducting online research she found a photograph of men carrying out work on a tar-making kiln and instinctively knew she was on the right track.

“It looked just like the money pit,” she said.

“Next thing I know, here’s the depression popping up on what it looks like after you make naval stores. There’s always subsidence because of the wood underneath.”

But the smoking gun, said Steele, is a bevelled wooden box containing a small hole that she said was used as a bucket funnel to direct a steady flow of tar into a barrel.

Although there is little information about naval stores in Canadian history, Steele’s theory has been recently backed up by a South Carolina archeologist who has studied the naval stores industry, key to making and maintaining wooden ships.

“There’s nothing in our history,” said Steele.

“I had to go searching around to four countries’ histories to find out what this thing was. There’s not a lot of information out there. I mean there is, but you really have to dig hard.

“The remains of tar kilns are all over the coast of the United States. There’s hundreds of money pits along the eastern seaboard, as hikers even today often stumble upon saucer-shaped depressions with charcoal just below. It’s nothing new to the Americans, especially in the Carolinas, but as this old technology was largely lost to time, my aim is to open up a new vein of history here as it pertains to Nova Scotia.”

Steele maintains, however, that there are additional layers to the Oak Island mystery. Part of her belief centres on papers related to a royal family’s history that she said could be hidden on its shores.

According to Steele and a published article in the Bridgewater Bulletin in the 1980s, there is reason to suspect that three chests were deposited on Oak Island.

Steele said she believes these chests contain family papers that were bequeathed to Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, daughter of King Christian IV of Denmark, who was locked away in Copenhagen for 22 years.

Erin Pottie is a reporter in The Chronicle Herald’s Cape Breton bureau.